Joseph Solis-Mullen | The Libertarian Institute

The Economics of Deadwood

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Jan 23, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles

California’s catastrophic wildfires have become an annual tragedy. Beyond the devastation they bring to communities and ecosystems, these fires are a powerful metaphor for the unintended consequences of human intervention in natural systems. A primary culprit in California’s wildfire crisis is the state’s stringent environmental regulations, which often prevent the clearing of deadwood and other combustible materials. By not allowing these natural fuels to be managed by interested private companies, the state creates the perfect conditions for devastating infernos. This dynamic offers an...

The Illusion of Wartime Prosperity

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Jan 14, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

That war is of benefit to the business of voluntary exchange to mutual benefit is, as one of the last British bearers of the classical liberal flame, Norman Angell, remarked in 1909, the great illusion. Certainly there were some industries that gained, such as the makers of armaments, but on the whole society as a whole suffered a significant decline in its level of general welfare. Long before Angell made the remark, a critique of the intensifying protectionism, imperialism, and armaments procurement of the period that preceded the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the great...

Reintroducing Liberty’s Master Historian

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Jan 7, 2025 | Book Reviews, Featured Articles

On June 1, 1983, at a morning session of the Cato Institute Summer Seminar, attendees bore witness to what remains to this day one of the greatest single revisionist retellings of the tragic and formative period of world history: 1914-1945. For three hours, Dr. Ralph Raico held forth, touching on every relevant subject to the horrible thirty years of war that gave rise to communism, Nazism, nuclear bombs, the Cold War, and the all powerful state. He expertly tied together the decline of classical liberalism in the late nineteenth century and the rise of statism, the formation and growth of...

America’s Origins of Russophobia

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Dec 18, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

For those that grew up in the United States in the 1990s and 2000s, the explosion of Russophobia over the past decade likely came as something of a surprise. A brief survey of the history of Russophobia, however, reveals that the decade and a half after the end of the Cold War was something of an anomaly in the past century and a half of American foreign policy, with a blend of inherited geopolitical fears and ideological tensions leading to a generally anti-Russian sentiment in Washington. Our investigation begins with the so-called “Testament of Peter the Great.” An eighteenth century...

The DOGE(s) Before DOGE

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Dec 12, 2024 | Featured Articles, History, Politics

President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, represents the latest in a long line of ambitious attempts to streamline the U.S. federal government and address fiscal inefficiencies. While the symbolic aspects of DOGE—its internet meme-inspired acronym and high-profile leadership—signal a modern approach to government reform, the initiative bears striking similarities to previous efforts, notably the Keep Commission under President Theodore Roosevelt, the Grace Commission under President Ronald Reagan, and...

Ignoring China’s Redlines Could Make Taiwan the Next Ukraine

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Dec 5, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

The recent meeting between outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Lima, Peru offered a stark illustration of the divergent priorities and perspectives shaping the fraught U.S.-China relationship. While the Biden administration’s statement on the meeting emphasized “responsibly managing competition” and highlighted areas of potential cooperation, Xi took the opportunity to reiterate China’s concerns over American actions that Beijing views as infringements on its four “red lines.” These contrasts underscore the urgent need for Washington to reevaluate its...

Against the Tyranny of Urban Majorities

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Nov 26, 2024 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism

In a recent and rather surprising piece, The Wall Street Journal highlighted growing frustrations among rural residents of states like Illinois, solidly Republican regions who feel disenfranchised by the political dominance of urban metropolises like Chicago and the wider Cook County. The article described sentiments among rural Illinoisans who increasingly view their state government as an unrepresentative body, one that governs in the interests of urban elites while neglecting or outright opposing the values, interests, and livelihoods of those living in less densely populated areas. This...

Whether the Interest Rate Rises or Falls, Inflation Is Here to Stay

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Nov 21, 2024 | Economics, Featured Articles

In an economic landscape shaped by the aggressively rising prices of 2020-2022, the Federal Reserve's monetary policy pendulum swung dramatically. Starting from rock bottom rates, it engaged in a series of hikes the likes of which had not been seen since the early 1980s, moving from less than 1% in February 2022 to over 4% a year later. Going still higher with rates above 5% by the end of 2023, the Federal Reserve held rates there for the first half of 2024 in an attempt to bring the Consumer Price Index (CPI), one of its preferred price gauges, down from the scorching 9% peak in the summer...